Posted
by
BeauHDon Saturday February 27, 2016 @02:15PM
from the How-do-you-like-them-batteries dept.

mdsolar writes: BioSolar and the University of California, Santa Barbara, reinforced a previous international patent application by jointly filing applications in the U.S., Canada and Japan for something called a "multicomponent-approach to enhance stability and capacitance in polymer-hybrid supercapacitors." The BioSolar energy storage approach solves two core problems of conventional lithium-ion battery technology. One is the cost of materials, and the other is the limited capacity of the cathode compared to the anode. BioSolar has solved the cost and capacity problem by developing an inexpensive polymer for the cathode. "Our novel high capacity cathode is engineered from a polymer, similar to that of low-cost plastics used in the household. Through a smart chemical design, we are able to make the polymer hold an enormous amount of electrons. The estimated raw materials cost of our cathode is similar to that of inexpensive plastics, with a very high possible energy density of 1,000 Wh/kg." BioSolar's research also indicates that the new polymer enables batteries to charge and discharge rapidly while far outlasting the lifecycle of conventional lithium-ion energy storage. According to the company, conventional batteries drop down to 80 percent of their storage capacity after 1,000 charge/discharge cycles. When the new polymer is used in a supercapacitor, BioSolar's lab work has demonstrated a lifespan of 50,000 cycles without degradation.

While I want to agree with you, he's also pulling people who have never voted before in fairly large numbers. THAT's his, ahem, trump card. It's unlikely he wins but if he can pull in new votes he may not need as many people from the pool of normal voters.

True, it's looking like Reagan all over again in terms of popularity but far more scary in terms of what Trump is saying. The only upside is Trump knows he's just spinning bullshit with things like Mexico paying for some sort of wall and all the rest of the blatant salesmanship.

Our enemies in the middle east who take Trump's word as being real probably think Bin Laden has won and America has doomed itself. America is not doomed if Trump wins because the batshit insane suggestions are just "spin" and he'l

The only problem with that is GWB was largely kept in check by the last vestige of the old GOP guard in the Senate. They didn't do crazy shit.

And now the Senate is as crazy as the House was and the House is beyond loony toons. That means Trump would have to start vetoing GOP crazy bills and I don't really see that happening as often as would be necessary.

The only silver lining is that Trump might cost them the Senate (if the SCOTUS obstruction doesn't by itself).

The only problem with that is GWB was largely kept in check by the last vestige of the old GOP guard in the Senate. They didn't do crazy shit.

That "old guard" were pushing to invade Iraq for years and finally got a chance to do it when some Saudis led by a guy given shelter in Afganistan got up to no good. Sounds crazy to me. There is far crazier but I think things will be stuck at that level. It's best to remember that a lot of the really crazy shit is about throwing a spanner in the works when somebody

There aren't enough "sane republicans" left to populate Rhode Island and even if they were numerous, they'll vote for the nominee.There's an old saying that accurately describes the parties - "Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line"

Alas, Trump, with his trade-war-monger rhetoric, is drawing a lot of support from the normally reliable Democrat organized labor voters. How important a part of the "Democrat Base" is organized labor? Less than it used to be, perhaps, but it's still significant.

Look at history. No Democrat has succeeded another democrat since Harry Truman. I don't count LBJ because of the shooting thing with JFK. He was installed, not elected. Then he was simply re-elected. In fact, Truman doesn't count either, he succeeded Roosevelt when he died in office. So certainly no modern Dem has succeeded another Dem. Reps succeed Reps all the time. In fact it's just about expected. GW Bush stunk up the place so bad, he broke that.

Not impressed with your numbers. Small numbers voted for Obama as well. He managed to get elected on "hope and change." What change? Never said. I heard a glimmer of hope from I think Rubio today. He actually started to talk more like Trump. Probably too little, too late.

Hillary, I have a feeling she'll be indicted soon. Besides, I understand she has suffered a couple of strokes on the road and I understand she's showing signs of Alzheimer's. I think that was actually published someplace (alzheimers). I can

Well, we will see. I remain confident in my assessment. Also quite convinced Obama's done the right thing in most, not all, of the areas he's had the opportunity to do anything at all. The ACA is not the single payer system he asked for. It's a mutation created by Congress. It's still far better than the previous state of affairs, and I'm sure it will continue to evolve. Clinton won't be indicted, IMHO. Too entwined with the power structure. Not to mention they'd have to indict Colin Powell and Susan Rice a

The same big names will provide clean and renewable energy in the future.

Maybe not. If batteries are cheap, and solar panels are cheap, then I can just have my own batteries and panels. So why do I need to buy energy from a "big company"? In my neighborhood, I already see dozens of houses with solar panels. Imagine how many will have them when they actually make sense!

This will change once he cuts himself of oil for transportation. But the number you are looking for is somewhat subjective. Some people are willing to pay more because of ideological reasons and some will count any hassles as a barrier.

For me, cheap enough will be below current prices and i can have the system paid off within 5 years with the ability to quickly and easily repair anything myself or have someone do it for me within a day or so. That's what I have now with electric bills between $50 and $100

I suggest you enrol to vote and maybe do something about it instead of putting up with that shit.Land of the free my arse. Don't need to wear a seatbelt so have the right to die stupid but you can't have a water tank? If you all got off your backsides and voted those few that play at politics couldn't put such things over on you.

Oh, I recognize the context. However, that context fits into a larger context. It is becoming illegal to not be interfaced with some government mandated corporate monopoly or another somewhere along the line - be it power, or water, or sewage,or whatever. You must be trackable For Your Own Safety(TM)

Where do you live that you have to connect to the grid? I know a guy who keeps his milk in an ice cooler. He doesn't bother with any electricity if it's not in a battery. You know, use of electricity commercially began in the late 1800s. My grandfather was the first in his family to have electric lights. Millions of people lived without it even then. I can see a day coming where millions will live without it again.

It depends where you live. For some people I know it was 2002 since the utility wanted thousands to run a line in. Now it's looking like it's going to happen in the suburbs in some areas due to blatant price gouging.It may be expensive to go offgrid but it's starting to get to be very expensive to stay on the grid in some areas, especially when you get conflicts of interest with governments having electricity companies as a major source of revenue (eg. in Australia).

You'll still be buying batteries and panels initially from someone. and there will be a (smaller) market for maintenance and/ or repair.

Hay merchants used to provide many kilos of food every day to every propulsion source in the land. Then, as new transport methods developed, some morphed into selling coal (for railways), wheels (for wagons), or mineral oil (for internal combustion engines). And some people who remained selling hay for horses, went out of business.

Wake me up when they have batteries actually built and selling at that price point. Until then it's just bluster: there's no way to know what industrial challenges will creep in and drive the price up.

Wake me up when they have batteries actually built and selling at that price point. Until then it's just bluster: there's no way to know what industrial challenges will creep in and drive the price up.

I know, who cares about scientific research and progress, we are instant gratification consumers god dammit, if we can't buy it at Costco right now it has now value or interest. This should be posted to a site that cares about news for geeks.

Yes, that is right. Reminds me of EEStor which every now and then repeats their promise of transformative super-capacitors based on their granted patents. But it is just vaporware. Hopefully this time is better, but anyone who is not a fool knows to expect most of these press releases to come to nothing.

How much of that is snazzy cutting edge tech, and how much is existing tech at much higher economies of scale?

I don't know if you can separate "cutting edge tech" from "economies of scale." Economies of scale allow you to economically adopt technologies for production that could never have been used before (i.e. "cutting edge") due to limited scale. Think of a dozen guys putting together a car vs a robotic production line. The biggest gains these day's from economies of scale ARE technological (think volumes reaching a point that make "automation" worth it). Generally speaking, economies of scale results in the inc

Think of a three guys assembling a car vs. Henry Ford's assembly line: very little high tech, but very much economies of scale.

I agree, over a hundred years ago economies of scale were not so technologically focused (though, I feel there is a strong argument that the assembly line, itself, is a technology that only makes sense at a certain volume, but I digress. ..). Do you have any examples more recent than a century ago? Sure, there are volume discounts, financing cost reductions, etc. . . but technology related CapEx is by far #1 these days. At least for similarly quickly advancing technologies (solar, wind, portable computing

I agree it is impossible to explain my point to someone who thinks: economies of scale = learning-by-doing. This will not be my first failure to try to teach rudimentary economics to a/.-er. ..

And each iteration of a factory pumps out millions of units using the same process (barring the occasional tweak).

Nor do I have time to explain the semiconductor industry to you. . . there are plenty of resources online. Saying that Intel's Tick-Tock [wikipedia.org] process just requires an "occasional tweak" is laughable to anyone with even a very basic grasp of the matter. You are really missing out on the pinnacle of human technological dev

I did not write that. I wrote "each iteration of a factory". If the tick and the tock require different fab equipment (and thus huge new capital expenditures), then they are different iterations of the factory.

Some of us are old enough to have seen thousands of these "in 10 years" vaporware press releases for stuff that never gets put in production, and so have become quite jaded.

Some of us a wise enough to have seen thousands of these "in 10 years" press releases for stuff that made it into production just fine. You're just picking out the failures to suit your agenda. I'm typing this post on a device that was built upon hundreds of press releases promising thinner, better, faster, using less power, as all the key points.

All the time. You just don't see it in press releases and it doesn't appear here on/. Take a look at the cost curve for batteries. It's not flat, it's been decreasing significantly as the technologies have been integrated and production volume has gone up. For example, read this [hybridcars.com] discussing the decreasing costs for EV and hybrid vehicles. its one of the primary reasons that the Bolt will less expensive. 5 years ago, it would be twice the price.

I know, who cares about scientific research and progress, we are instant gratification consumers god dammit, if we can't buy it at Costco right now it has now value or interest.

This is about making extraordinary claims without evidence commensurate with claim and being surprised or upset when people elect to filter it as noise.

All of these battery breakthrough articles are the same. They talk about hopes rather than current reality and actual accomplishments, they spend no time honestly addressing downsides or risks to success of technology and are heavily biased toward attracting attention of investors.

The following is an advertisement not an informative article about scientific

Who cares about scientific research and progress? I do. But this wasn't a story about science, it was a story about price. Nobody is worse at predicting price than researchers who discover science but don't industrially produce anything.

Yet another battery breakthrough article for what is essentially a lab demo. While I have not particular knowledge of whether or not this technology is manufacturable, it seems like an awful lot of battery breakthroughs don't really pan out once it comes to building them in to actual products.

Within 10 years, it will be cheaper to buy an electric car with a 300 mile range than it will to buy a gas car with equivalent trim level. I will personally bet you $100 on that.

Yeah yeah I can already hear your followup argument "But I drive 3,000 miles a day each way to work and my town doesn't have electricity". A $20,000 300 mile range electric car won't work for everyone, but it will work for 90

Ah but that's oldskool solar panels, not the ones we have been repeatedly promised over the years. You'd be better off putting that 35k towards a nuclear bunker if Trump gets elected. Now that it transpires they didn't even use this technology to build a battery 10 years might be on the optimistic side, however a good few of the improved battery technologies promised in the late 2000's should be appearing on the market in the next few years

In a scenario where only power coming directly from a national grid is considered, natural gas is expensive, and significant financial and political hurdles have been overcome, batteries are not crucial. But outside of that scenario there are still tremendous gains that could be realized by better and cheaper batteries.

As usual they "created" a battery on paper. After testing this 'amazing' polymer anode, they claim, combined with graphite cathode a magical-battery could be plausible. Nothing to see here folks its just vaporware. This is just more bull to keep their gravy train going. If they wanted real information they could simply have added the graphite cathode and published real world performance.

Ok, so what's the deal with this 'battery breakthrough'. Is it a lie? I ask the provocative question because I've heard a *lot* of "battery breakthrough" stories (they are almost as common as solar panel breakthroughs), and yet....new batteries that store gobs of power? Example: a few years ago, there was a 'super battery breakthrough' here [sciencedaily.com], that is supposed to be a wildly better way to manufacture batteries where the cathode is so much better than before. And if you note the date of the article, its m

I remember a somewhat similar question : why don't we do 5nm semi-conductors right now instead of wasting time with 28nm, 22nm, 14nm etc.?

Well I'm not sure what the answer is but I would say it is too hard, or even impossible.Even with $10 billion cash in hand, it's going to take many years to build that 5nm fab.Going from lab experiment to mass production of a "super battery" seems easier in comparison but will still take time, a ballpark figure given for industrialization of something is 5 years. Perhaps

"BioSolar's research also indicates that the new polymer enables batteries to charge and discharge rapidly while far outlasting the lifecycle of conventional lithium-ion energy storage."

Can these batteries recharge at a rate comparable to refilling my truck with gasoline? I doubt it. I can refill my truck in about five minutes, there is no way a battery can transfer that kind of energy in that amount of time, even if we account for the poor efficiency of an ICE to the high efficiency BEV and adjust energy needed accordingly.

What really holds back electric vehicles is not just the limited range alone but the recharge rate. If I can recharge a BEV at the same rate I can refill my dinosaur burning truck then I would not have a problem with them. A five minute stop every so often on a road trip is usually not an issue for people, people typically have to stop anyway for biological reasons. A four hour stop, or even a 30 minute stop, can be a problem for people.

Assuming we can find a battery that can take a charge comparable to the energy transfer of a roadside gasoline pump the problem then becomes creating a system to move that many electrons safely on something that must move down a road.

Every improvement in EV technology will improve their share, but I think the low hanging fruit is price, not charge time.Drop the price from $55k to $20k, and you'll sell a lot more than if you drop the charge time from 5 hours to 5 minutes.

There is a large and very consequential difference between a 30 minute stop and a 4 hour stop. My wife has a Tesla S80, and a lunch stop at a supercharger station halfway towards Reno from the SF bay area makes the trip easy. The stop is usually more like 40 minutes, and that gets the car pretty full. If it took 4 hours to do the same, we'd take our ICE vehicle instead.

What really holds back electric vehicles is not just the limited range alone but the recharge rate.

I don't think it works like that. You recharge your electric car at home, at night. Every morning, it's fully charged. If you occasionally make trips that aren't within your EV's range, then some manufacturers, like Nissan, have contracts where you can pick up a ICE rental car for free (with a limit of a couple of weeks per year).

Of course, if you routinely make trips longer than the EV's range, you're totally right.

Normally twice every week but if I'm traveling then it can be twice per day. A tank of gas can carry me about 300 miles, which also happens to be a bit short of how many miles I am willing to drive in a day. Add in that I would not wish to run the tank dry before filling it up and I might stop for fuel three times in a day.

In my truck I can go from any level of fuel, including bone dry empty, to full in five minutes. If in a BEV it might be possible to go from 10% to 80% in thirty minutes or less, if the

I really hope that this is not one of those things where they have a tiny postage stamp sized things freshly pulled from a beaker that can power an LED. Keep in mind that I can stuff some metal wires into a lemon and power an LED.

I want to see a demonstration unit that is doing something where I can calculate the power output. So a 5 KG battery boiling from room temperature a known amount of water. That is something where the energy efficiency is fairly high and the physics are boringly hard to fake.

I am sick of these battery breakthroughs not having any "proof" I am OK with a 10 minute video that shows one of their batteries doing something such as the boiling water thing sped up with a clock in the background. In fact I am far more interested in that than some MBA wannabe just sitting in a chair talking about how this technology will make people immortal on Mars.

But 5 minutes of blah blah, with 10 seconds in a lab showing some unknown motor or bulb running for a few seconds is not proof, it is nothing. Again, I can do stuff with a lemon. What will not happen is a few more developments that lets me drive a Tesla with that lemon.

And likely just as real. It is high time that any and all patent applications require delivery of a working prototype and for extraordinary claims such as these, independent creation of the device by a 3rd party based on the patent application only to verify the patent application is complete and truthful. It should not be possible to patent non-extraordinary things in the first place.

First, do the people talking about the science get their units right?...

Ok, you have to look past that. Here we could very well have a situation where there's a *Super* Genius talking to a Reporter - someone that couldn't get a real job most of the time. At Maryland, if you flunk out of everything else, you can be a journalist. The dumbest of the dumb. So to me they're like the anti-science people. It's wonder reporting - If they get it right, it's a wonder.

I stopped looking into this stuff a long time ago. It's nothing, or if it's something it involves some really bad chemical

Except the 50,000 cycle number is for supercapacitors, which suffer none of the chemical reactions that cause breakdown in chemical batteries. I can't think of any reason it would even be mentioned except for intentional deception by implication.

I would say no - a battery stores power as chemical energy. A capacitor as electrostatic potential. Two completely different devices. Might make a decent battery substitute in some situations, but not many consisdering supercaps typically have... I think it's 30x less energy density than lithium ions.

No because that would be like calling a car a capable horse:)If it's used for the same purpose it's still a different thing.

You've reminded me of a superhero movie where the villian was secretly building a giant capacitor plant instead of a power station. The scriptwriters did not get how awesome such a thing would be and how we could get away from the artifact of base load with such a thing and instead just follow demand without offering discounts for night use etc. Pump storage does that sort of job